Sunday Times

April 1, 2012

This week I’ve trudged through wet cow patties in my muckers, lugged myself and my asleep muscles out from underneath my moss green pillows at hours all-too-early in the morning to cut bales of hay out to cows in the barn, spent an entire afternoon collecting rusted barbed wire and old fence panels to load onto the tractor and haul off the land that will soon be fresh pasture for our calves, ground our own chicken feed from scratch, and assisted in getting bulls out of fields of cows to which they should no longer breed and into a field with each other so that they could assert themselves and establish a quick, painless pecking order. All aspiring agrarian tasks, if I do say so myself, but sometimes…

a

girl

just

needs

some

s.u.s.h.i.

And a New York Times, snatched in “town” after church at our food co-op. Talk about a splurge Sunday. But it brought me to my otherhome for a moment, and it was ohsosweet.

On a hilarious note about these Sunday times, when Jason left me at home after doing our morning farm chores to get ready for church, he left a scruffy, bed-headed “mountain woman” (named so by Papaw Bowman for my ripped jeans, up-do, and tattered but beloved navaho-inspired sweater) in muckers, work jeans and a Carhartt jacket, sans mascara. When he came home in the afternoon, he opened the door to the kitchen where his wife was sitting in a graphic black and white wrap-around skirt, a poofy-shouldered shirt, high boots and massive earrings reading a Times and eating sushi on china. He had a moment of confusion about where, in fact, he was and who, in fact, I was, and then burst into laughter. His assumption was that I probably wouldn’t be joining him to work out in the field, not in this condition. He was right. I was on strike on day seven of the week–rest, reading and relaxation like the Sundays of old…

ps–just a note…other than in the early mornings, I do in fact where dangly earrings with my Carhartt to work on the farm. Keeps things interesting.